I
The phrase “civil disobedience”
now used so widely
for all cases of individual or group dissent from
civil
law appeared on the scene quite late. Henry David
Thoreau is
usually credited with coining the term,
though it is not known for certain
that he did or why
he changed the title of his essay, later to become
world
famous, from “Resistance to Civil Government”
to
“Civil Disobedience.”
The concept of civil disobedience, as distinct from
the phrase, has a long
and notable history, appearing
already as the Antigone theme in Greek drama
and
in the antiwar motif of Lysistrata, where the
women,
in addition to deserting their men, seize the Acropolis
and the
Treasury of Athens. The conflict between civil
law and conscience was
sharply featured when the Jews
passively resisted the introduction of icons
into Jerusa-
lem by Pilate, procurator of
Judaea, and by Jesus in
his dramatic purification of the temple, when he over-
turned the tables of the money changers
and the seats
of those who legally sold pigeons. The conflict has been
highlighted in the history of English-speaking countries
many times, though
rarely more forcefully than when
Milton refused to obey the licensing and
censorship
laws of seventeenth-century England and when the
Abolitionists attacked the institution of slavery in
nineteenth-century
America. The most widely known
cases of the conflict in the twentieth
century are
Gandhi's campaigns against colonial rule in South
Africa
and India, passive resistance campaigns against
Nazi occupation governments
during World War II,
and the civil rights campaign against segregation
in
the United States starting in 1954. Civil disobedience
attitudes
and techniques also spread into attacks against
the Vietnam War, draft
laws, poverty, and the authori-
tarian
structure of colleges and universities in the
1960's.
As the examples of it make clear, the concept of
civil disobedience is
extremely rich and diverse, not
at all precise and specific—the
way it is with most
terms or ideas outside of a formal system. Yet
much
can be done to analyze and clarify the concept, though
not
formally define it, if attention is paid to recurring
themes in the rich
context of historical examples. An
appreciation of these themes, without
fixation on any
one case, will, hopefully, make it possible to avoid
the
emotionally persuasive definitions of what civil disobe-
dience “really”
is, so popular at times as different
groups try to put the phrase to work
for them.
The concept of civil disobedience presupposes, first
of all, some formal
structure of law, enforced by estab-
lished
governmental authorities, from which an indi-
vidual cannot dissociate himself except by change of
citizenship.
(Disobedience in the contexts of family,
clan, church, lodge, or business
does not count as civil
disobedience.) It is not necessary, however, that
an
individual ultimately accept the governmental frame-
work in which he acts disobediently; he may be ac-
cepting it only conditionally at a given
time as a nec-
essary but temporary fact of
life or as a step in the
direction toward the framework he ultimately
accepts.
To insist on the ultimate acceptance of the framework
in
which the act occurs, as some authors do, has the
absurd consequence of
denying that Thoreau, Tolstoi,
and Gandhi engaged in acts of civil
disobedience, since
Thoreau and Tolstoi were anarchists and Gandhi was
protesting colonial rule.
Civil disobedience, then, consists in publicly an-
nounced defiance of specific laws, policies, or com-
mands of that formal structure which an individual or
group believes to be unjust and/or unconstitutional.
The defiance may also
take the form of disobedience
of just laws if such disobedience appears to be an
effective
way to focus public attention on unjust laws.
The defiance must be publicly
announced, since the
point of it is to bring the unjust and/or
unconstitutional
laws, policies, or commands to the attention of the
public, for the purpose either of stirring its conscience
or of frightening
it into helping repeal the laws, change
the policies, or mitigate the
commands; or to get the
attention of the courts so that their
constitutionality
can be judged. The defiance may take the form of
doing
what is prohibited (say, burning a draft card) or of
failing to
do what is required (say, refusing to report
for induction). The defiance,
moreover, must be a pre-
meditated act,
understood to be illegal by the perpe-
trator, and understood to carry prescribed penalties.
Willingness to
accept such penalties is a crucial part
of that sort of civil disobedience
which hopes to stir
the public conscience, while eagerness to escape pun-
ishment is perfectly compatible with that
sort of civil
disobedience which aims to pressure and frighten the
public. The defiance, finally, may be either nonviolent
or violent and
still count as civil disobedience. To
restrict the concept of civil
disobedience to nonviolent
acts, as some authors do, ignores the difficulty
of finding
a precise dividing line between
“nonviolence” and
“violence”
(Is rigidly blocking a doorway nonviolent?)
as well
as the facts of usage. Defiant acts of a violent
sort, if they are focused,
at least for the present, on
specific laws, policies, or commands (and
hence are
short of unrestricted defiance of the whole government)
and
meet the above criteria, are in fact called acts of
civil disobedience just
as much as those which meet
the same criteria but are nonviolent.
